1581 papers
Statistical mechanics explores how the chaotic motion of countless tiny particles gives rise to the predictable laws governing heat, pressure, and phase transitions. This field bridges the gap between the microscopic world of atoms and the macroscopic reality we experience daily, offering deep insights into why materials behave the way they do.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category as it appears on arXiv to make these complex findings accessible to everyone. For each paper, we provide both a plain-language explanation for the curious reader and a detailed technical summary for specialists, ensuring that groundbreaking research is never lost behind a wall of jargon.
Below are the latest papers in statistical mechanics, freshly curated and summarized to help you understand the cutting edge of this fascinating discipline.
This paper investigates the first-return time of random walkers undergoing fractional diffusion with Mittag-Leffler distributed waiting times, demonstrating that for symmetric jump distributions, the return time density depends solely on the waiting-time distribution and providing exact results for both Markovian and non-Markovian settings under different temporal orderings of jumps and waits.
This paper introduces a scalable framework combining any-order autoregressive models with marginalization models to efficiently generate atomic configurations for lattice thermodynamics, enabling accurate free energy predictions and phase transition analysis in larger systems at reduced computational cost compared to traditional sampling methods.
This paper develops a nonlinear optical thermodynamic theory based on a van der Waals-type equation of state that accounts for inter-mode interactions, enabling the prediction of phenomena such as power localization and optical Joule-Thomson cooling/heating.
This paper investigates a minimal three-particle active matter model to demonstrate how self-propulsion reshapes the entropic landscape of cage breaking, revealing that relaxation is fastest when the persistence length matches the particle radius and that activity fundamentally breaks detailed balance to create circulating probability currents.
This paper revisits Chandrasekhar's conditions for stellar equilibrium and stability by employing a universal three-parameter non-Maxwell distribution, deriving generalized maximum radiation pressures and demonstrating through numerical analysis that such non-Maxwellian distributions typically reduce these pressures compared to traditional Maxwellian assumptions.
This study demonstrates that a two-dimensional random organization model exhibits glass and jamming transitions with critical properties and marginal stability analogous to thermal soft-particle systems, revealing that the non-equilibrium nature of the microscopic dynamics has little impact on the resulting physical behaviors while showing that jamming locations are protocol-dependent and hyperuniformity is non-universal.
This paper introduces a minimal model of a self-steering active particle to decompose its entropy production into distinct sensing, actuation, and locomotion costs, revealing fundamental thermodynamic trade-offs that constrain the precision and performance of feedback-controlled navigation.
This paper analyzes a discrete-time binary branching random walk with a repulsion penalty for close particles, demonstrating that the optimal configurations at time exhibit a spatial spread of order and incur a total cost of order .
This paper proposes and validates an adiabatic quantum algorithm that efficiently prepares both ground and arbitrary high-energy eigenstates of integrable models, such as the XXZ Heisenberg and Richardson-Gaudin chains, with a circuit depth that scales polynomially with system size by leveraging local conserved quantities and the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz.
By combining realistic molecular models with a novel "flip" Monte Carlo algorithm that achieves a sampling speedup, this study enables the first comprehensive equilibrium analysis of molecular glass-formers near the experimental glass transition, revealing physical behaviors such as fragility and Stokes-Einstein breakdown that closely match experimental observations.